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1. For analysis of some cultural forces supporting this interest, see E.I. Taylor. "Desperately Seeking Spirituality." Psychology Today, Nov.-Dec. 1994, p. 56.
2. Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary: Etymologically and Philogically Arranged with Special Reference to Cognate Indo-European Languages. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951 ed., establishes the feminine root dhya as generic to the Vedic, Classical, and Buddhist hybrid Sanskit traditions, p. 521. Dharana, dhyana, and samadhi are characterized as samyama, the three-fold tool, in The Yoga Sutras.
3. H. Zimmer. The Philosophies of India. New York: Pantheon, 1951.
4. Mircea Eliade. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Translated from the French by Willard R. Trask. New York: Bollingen Foundation; distributed by Pantheon Books, 1964; H. Ellenberger. Discovery of the Unconscious. New York: Basic Books, 1970.
5. Mircea Eliade and Joseph M. Kitagawa, eds. The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959.
6. Frederick J. Streng. Understanding Religious Life. 2d ed. Encino, CA: Dickenson Pub. Co., 1976.
7. See, for instance, Studia Mysticorum, Newsletter of the Mysticism Study Group within the American Academy of Religion (Published by The Essene Press for The Cambridge Institute of Psychology and Religion, 98 Clifton St., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02140).
8. The following section has been complied from E.I. Taylor. "Asian Interpretations: Transcending the Stream of Consciousness." In K. Pope and J. Singer, eds. The Stream of Consciousness: Scientific Investigations into the Flow of Human Experience. New York: Plenum, l978, 31-54. Reprinted in J. Pickering and M. Skinner, eds. From Sentience to Symbol: Readings on Consciousness. London: Harvester-Westsheaf, and Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990; E.I. Taylor."Psychology of Religion and Asian Studies: The William James Legacy." Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, l0:l, l978, 66-79; E.I. Taylor. "Contemporary Interest in Classical Eastern Psychology." In A. Paranjpe, D. Ho, and R. Rieber, eds. Asian Contributions to Psychology. New York: Praeger, l988, 79-122; E.I. Taylor, "Our Roots: The American Visionary Tradition." Noetic Sciences Review, Autumn 1993 (Twentieth Anniversary Issue), 6-17; and E.I. Taylor. The Great Awakening: Folk-Psychology and the American Visionary Tradition. [This was published as Shadow Culture: Psychology and Spirituality in America. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1999. Web Editor.]
9. Charles Alexander. Maharishi International School of Management, 1996 (personal communication).
10. The following is based on interviews with Jon Kabat-Zinn and his colleague Ann Massion, March 1996.
11. William Mikulas, "Behaviors of the Mind." Unpublished course materials, Department of Psychology, University of West Florida, March 1995.
12. See, for instance, W.L. Mikulas. Concepts in Learning. Philadephia: W.B. Saunders, 1974; W.L. Mikulas. Behavior Modification. New York: Harper and Row, 1978; W.L. Mikulas. "Four Nobel Truths of Buddhism Related to Behavior Therapy." Psychological Record 28 (1978): 59-67; W.L. Mikulas. Skills of Living. Lanham, MD : University Press of America, 1983; W.L. Mikulas. "Self-Control: Essence and Development." Psychological Record 36 (1986) 297-308; W.L. Mikulas. The Way Beyond. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1987; W.L. Mikulas. "Mindfulness, Self-Control, and Personal Growth." In M.G.T. Kwee, ed. Psychotherapy, Meditation, and Health. London/The Hague: East-West Publications, 1990; W.L. Mikulas. "Eastern and Western Psychology: Issues and Domains for Integration." International Journal of Integrative and Eclectic Psychotherapy 10 (1991): 29-40.
13. See, for instance, M. Epstein. Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective. Foreward by the Dalai Lama. New York: Basic Books, 1995.
M.G.T. Kwee, ed. Psychotherapy, Meditation, and Health. London/The Hague: East-West Publications, 1990; M.A. West, ed. The Psychology of Meditation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987; D.H. Shapiro Jr. and Roger N. Walsh, eds. Meditation, Classic and Contemporary Perspectives. New York: Aldine Pub. Co., 1984; D. Goleman. The Meditative Mind: Varieties of Meditative Experience. Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1988.
14. Dean Ornish. Stress, Diet, and Your Heart. New York : Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1982; D. Ornish. Eat More, Weigh Less. New York : HarperCollins, 1993.
15. As another example, one of the largest pain clinics in the world, the Diamond Headache Clinic in Chicago, utilized a unique approach of non-pharmacologic techniques from behavioral medicine in combination with advanced pharmacologic interventions to accelerate response to pain reduction. Non-pharmacologic interventions included regimes such as relaxation, meditation, and biofeedback. See S. Diamond, F.C. Freitas, and M. Maliszewski. "Inpatient Treatment of Headache: Long-term Results." Headache 26, no. 4 (1986): 189-197.
16. Published by InnoVision Communications, 101 Columbia, Aliso Viejo CA 92656 (800-899-1712).
17. East-West Center for the Healing Arts, 561 Berkeley Avenue, Menlo Park CA 94025.
18. Investigations of Qi Gong are being carried out in Korea and Japan as well. See, for instance, H. Ryu, C.D. Jun, B.S. Lee, B.M. Choi, H.M. Kim, and H. Chung. "Effect of Qi Gong Training on Proportions of T Lymphocyte Subsets in Human Peripheral Blood." American Journal of Chinese Medicine, XXII, No. 1 (1995): 27-36; and Yasuo Yuasa. "Traditional Eastern Philosophy and Scientific Technology Today." Obirin Review of International Studies, 3 (1991): 23-40.
19. Yoga Biomedical Trust, PO Box 140, Cambridge CB4 3SY. (Tel. +44-1223-67301).
20. H.R. Jarrell. International Meditation Bibliography, 1950-1982. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1985.
21. In addition to this international bibliography, forthcoming, and an unexpected boon to future experimental investigations, will be Prof. Y. Haruki's Meditation Researchers around the World: An International Overview, published by the Masara Ibuka Foundation and the Advanced Research Center for Human Sciences at Waseda University in Tokyo. [This was published as Comparative and Psychological Studies on Meditation. Tokyo: Waseda University Press, 1996. Web Editor.]
22. American Psychiatric Association, unsigned statement. American Journal of Psychiatry, 134 (1977): p. 720.
23. Now, in a forthcoming lead article in the American Psychologist Shapiro, Schwartz, et al. present an even more detailed picture of meditation in the context of cognitive strategies for self-control. D.H. Shapiro, C.E. Schwartz, and J. A. Austin. "Controlling Ourselves, Controlling our World." American Psychologist 51, no. 12 (1996): 1213-1230.
24. Daniel Druckman and John A. Swets, eds. Enhancing Human Performance: Issues, Theories, and Techniques (1988) and Daniel Druckman and Robert A. Bjork, eds. In the Mind's Eye: Enhancing Human Performance. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1991.
25. This lone researcher had originally based his own conclusions on only 300 of the 1,253 entries he had taken from Murphy and Donovan's first edition. For an analysis of their analysis, see E.I. Taylor. "Radical Empiricism and the Conduct of Research." In Willis Harman and Jane Clark, eds. New Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. Sausalito, CA: Institute of Noetic Sciences, 1994.
26. NIH Technology and Assessment Panel. The Integration of Behavioral and Relaxation Approaches into the Treatment of Chronic Pain and Insomnia. Bethesda, MD: NIH, 1995.
28. Wenger and Bagchi, 1961. Wenger, Bagchi, and Anand guessed that these three subjects used the Valsalva maneuver, consisting of strong abdominal contractions and breath arrest, to reduce venous return to the heart. "With little blood to pump the heart," they wrote, "sounds are diminished . . . and the palpable radial pulse seems to disappear. High amplification finger plethysmography continued to show pulse waves, however; and the electrocardiograph showed heart [contractions]." During such breath retention, moreover, their subjects' hearts changed position so that the potentials in one of their EKG leads decreased, which led Wenger and Bagchi to suggest that Brosse's earlier demonstration of complete heart cessation might have resulted from her use of a single EKG lead that lost its potentials when her subject's heart position shifted.
29. Satyanarayanamurthi and Shastry, 1958. Anand and Chhina, again, investigated three yogis who said they could stop their hearts. They found that to accomplish this, all three increased their intrathoracic pressure by forceful abdominal contractions with closed glottis after inspiration or expiration. Like Bagchi and Wenger, they discovered that their subjects' heartbeats could not be detected with a stethoscope after such a maneuver and that their arterial pulse could not be felt, though EKGs showed that their hearts were contracting normally with a deviation of axis to the right when the subjects held their breath after inspiration, and a deviation to the left after expiration. Furthermore, X-ray examinations showed that each subject's heart became narrower in transverse diameter and somewhat tubular while he was trying to stop it. The three yogis "could not stop . . . their heart beats," Anand and Chhina wrote, "[but] they greatly decreased their cardiac output by decreasing venous return [and] the decrease in cardiac output is responsible for the imperceptible arterial pulse. This practice of yogis is identical with the Valsalva maneuver." Like Bagchi and Wenger, they suggested that Brosse's experiment had been flawed because she had used a single EKG lead with her subject.
30. Anand et al., 1961. A second study with an airtight box reported by P. V. Karambelkar and associates compared the reactions of an accomplished yogi, a yoga student, and two controls during confinements ranging from 12 to 18 hours. The box used in this experiment was closely monitored for oxygen and carbon dioxide content, having been thoroughly tested for leakage, and the subjects were attached to an EKG, a respiratory strain gauge belt, an EEG, a blood pressure recording device, and a measure of their galvanic skin response. Each subject stayed in the box until its CO2 level caused him discomfort. The yogi remained for 18 hours, until the air he was breathing reached 7.7% CO2, while the other three stayed from 12 1/2 to 13 3/4 hours, when their CO2 levels reached 6.6 to 7.2%. The yogi stayed longer, the authors suggested, because he was habituated to such situations. But their yoga student, not their professional yogi, showed the least reduction in oxygen consumption as his CO2 levels increased. He could withstand higher levels of CO2, the authors argued, because for three years he had practiced the kumbhaka or breath-holding exercise of pranayama, which had trained his body to function with the increased alveolar CO2 the exercise produces. Subsequently, the professional yogi increased his pranayama practice and exhibited improved adaptation to CO2 (Karambelkar, Vinekar and Bhole, 1968; and Bhole, et al., 1967).
31. I.K. Taimni. Patanjali's "Yoga Sutras," Book I, verses 2-4. In The Science of Yoga. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1975.
32. Swami Nikilananda, tr. The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. NY: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1977. See especially Swami Nikhilananda's introduction for descriptions of Sri Ramakrishna's ecstasies and their physical manifestations.
34. In the Sutras of Patanjali, for example, it is said that success in yoga requires dharana, a term derived from the Sanskrit root dhr, to grasp or seize, and dhyana, a flowing into the object that is grasped, which results in samadhi. In the Visuddhimagga, one of the great texts of Theravada Buddhism, a similar emphasis is placed on ekagrata, one-pointed attention, as the basis of higher states attained in meditation. And for the Christian "prayer of quiet," during which one apprehends the simple unity of God, single-minded attention is the fundamental requirement. All the great books of contemplative activity emphasize this effect of meditation practice.
35. [Freud and Jung were, of course, not the originators of psychotherapy. Their immediate precursors were the French psychopathologists, such as Charcot, Ribot, Binet, Janet, and Bernheim. See H. Ellenberger. Discovery of the Unconscious. New York: Basic Books, 1970. Ed.]
36. John S. Anson, "The Female Transvestite in Early Monasticism: The Origin and Development of a Motif," in Viator, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Vol. 5. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Caroline Walker Bynum. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. In the Middle Ages there developed a theology of "mother Jesus" that is seen in the religious writings of both men and women, "especially the sophisticated theology developed around it by the anchoress Julian of Norwich" (p. 111). It is possible that the Cistercians "borrowed the idea of mother Jesus from the Benedictine Anselm of Canterbury" (p. 112). Stella Kramrisch. Manifestations of Shiva. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1981, p. 18. Ardhanarisvara (Siva, the Lord Whose Half is Woman). "He reveals himself through the symbol of sexual biunity as beyond the duality of Siva and Sakti (his power), for both are within him. They are the symbols of the seed and the womb of the universe through whom the Great God Playfully creates, preserves and reabsorbs it." Philip Rawson. The Art of Tantra. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Rawson discusses the identification of the male participant with the male deity (e.g., Siva) and the female with the Goddess (e.g., Devi or Kali). The more complex, "solitary, interior meditative ritual, may combine the subtle body of both sexes within the sadhaka's single body" (p. 92). The emphasis in the tantric ritual is on the creation of the male-female tension of fullness, rather than seeking relief from that tension. Elemire Zola. The Androgyne: Reconciliation of Male and Female. New York: Crossroad, 1981. Zola discusses world religions, legends, and examples from history that are concerned with the ideal of androgyny. Androgyny is a means (and symbol) of completion within one being, containing both the male and female, and is a sign of unity.
37. Sri Aurobindo. Collected Works. Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1976. Volume 30 contains an index with many references to "equality" and "equanimity."
38. Aldous Huxley. The Perennial Philosophy. New York: Harper and Row, 1970, chap. 6.
41. Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, tr. The Song of God: The Bhagavad-Gita, with an introduction by Aldous Huxley. New York and Scarborough, Ontario: New American Library, 1944.
42. William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Longman's, 1902, 371.
45. T.M.P. Mahadevan. Ramana Maharshi: The Sage of Arunacala. London: Unwin Paperbacks, A Mandala Book, 1977.
46. Sri Aurobindo. Ibid., vol. 10, 43.
47. Sri Aurobindo. Ibid., vol. 21, 568.
48. S. Radhakrishnan, tr. The Principal Upanishads. New York: Humanities Press, 1978, 557.
49. Sri Aurobindo. Ibid., vol. 12: 450; vol. 18: 220, 259-60; vol. 19: 749; vol. 20: 12, 435; vol. 21: 668; vol. 23: 1018; vol. 26: 497; vol. 27: 217.
50. Swami Nikhilananda, tr. The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1977, 57.
51. St. John of the Cross. The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, and Otilio Rodriquez, with introduction by Kiernan Kavanaugh (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, ICS Publications, 1979). "When there is a question of imaginative visions of other supernatural communications apprehensible by the senses and independent of a man's free will, I affirm that . . . an individual must not desire to give them admittance, even though they come from God . . . by doing so a person frees himself from the task of discerning the true visions from the false ones and deciding whether his visions come from an agent of light or of darkness" (p. 158).
"One of the means with which the devil readily catches uncautious souls, and impedes them in the way of spiritual truthfulness, is the supernatural and extraordinary phenomena he manifests through images, either through the material and corporal ones the Church uses, or through those he fixes in the phantasy in the guise of a particular saint. He transforms himself into an angel of light for the sake of deception . . . . The good soul should consequently be more cautious in the use of good things, for evil in itself gives testimony to itself" (p. 279).
"Since the devil transforms himself into an angel of light, he seems to be light to the soul. But this is not all. In the true visions from God, he can also tempt in many ways, by causing inordinate movements of the spiritual and sensory appetites and affections toward these visions. If the soul is pleased with these apprehensions, it is very easy for the devil to occasion an increase of its appetites and affections and a lapse into spiritual gluttony and other evils" (p. 228).
Louis J. Puhl. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1951. "It is a mark of the evil spirit to assume the appearance of an angel of light. He begins by suggesting thoughts that are suited to a devout soul, and ends by suggesting his own. For example, he will suggest holy and pious thoughts that are wholly in conformity with the sanctity of the soul. Afterwards, he will endeavor little by little to end by drawing his soul into his hidden snares and evil designs" (p. 148).
John, Bunyan. The Pilgrim's Progress. New York: Washington Square Press, 1961. "Now do I see myself in error. Did not the Shepherds bid us beware of the flatterers?" Christian cries (p. 128). But along comes "a Shining One" carrying "a whip of small cord in his hand." Christian tells him what happened, that he was led astray by "a black man, clothed in white." The Shining One says, "It is Flatterer, a false apostle, that hath transformed himself into an angel of light." He set them free, chastised them, taught them "the good way wherein they should walk" (p. 129).
52. Sri Aurobindo. Ibid., vol. 23, p.1024. For further references in Aurobindo's works to conscious sleep see vol. 18: 425; vol. 23: 1017; vol. 24: 1479-1483.
53. For a description of paranormal elements in Christian contemplative practice, see Herbert Thurston. The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism. London: Burns Oates, 1952. For references to similar elements in Taoist and Buddhist practice, see John Blofield. Taoism: The Road to Immortality. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 1978, and Taoist Mysteries and Magic. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 1973.
54. Eknath Easwaran, tr. Katha Upanishad. Petaluma, CA: Nigiri Press, The Blue Mountain Center of Meditation, 1970, Part I, Canto III, Verse VII, 17.
55. St. John of the Cross. Dark Night of the Soul, trans. Allison Peers. Westminister, MD: Newman Press, 1952.
56. Sri Aurobindo. Ibid. See vol. 30, Index and Glossary, for references to "difficulties," "fear," "contradictions," and other categories of spiritual problems.
57. Aldous Huxley. The Perennial Philosophy. New York: Harper, 1970.
58. William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Longman's, 1902.